


hold onto me

by moonlitserenades



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Avantika whomst? We don't know her, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, Pining, i'm overwhelmed, they're...they're just so cute???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:27:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24870799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlitserenades/pseuds/moonlitserenades
Summary: Fjord has a crush.Or:Falling, in five parts.
Relationships: Fjord/Jester Lavorre
Comments: 1
Kudos: 89





	hold onto me

i. 

Jester is dynamic. Frenetic. Jester does not care to sit still if she has literally any other option.

At night, Jester’s eyes look almost violet. Fjord realizes this entirely by accident, and loses the thread of what she’s saying in the noticing of it.

In direct sunlight, her hair is shot through with streaks of paler blue, and she has a smattering of freckles across her cheeks and nose.

Jester is impossible to look away from. 

After a while, Fjord gives up on trying.

ii.

Sometimes, he says stupid things just because he knows that she’ll laugh at them.

Sometimes, he asks questions he knows the answers to just so that he can hear whatever outrageous thing she comes up with to answer him.

(Sometimes, he asks questions he’s not sure he wants to know the answers to.

She always has an answer.)

She sings to herself a lot, quietly, like she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. 

He thinks, sometimes, on the nights when he can’t distract himself from it, that if he hadn’t been with her--if he hadn’t been able to hear her sing in that cage--that he would have broken before the others had come to rescue them.

Sometimes he spends the night with her and Beau just to talk to her more. Just to hear her sing again. 

iii.

It occurs to him that he is well and truly fucked when he realizes that he can recognize Jester by scent alone. A breath of lavender in the air or the smell of sugar nearby and he can pinpoint exactly where she is, able to already speak to her before he’s even fully turned to face her.

It’s not that that’s so unusual. They travel together, after all. He knows that Caleb smells of ink and incense, that Caduceus smells of herbs and flowers now that he doesn’t smell like a graveyard anymore...really, he’d probably know them all with his eyes closed at this point.

The difference is the way he feels when he realizes Jester is trying to sneak up behind him, or when he sits beside her and notices it. The way he relaxes automatically, but his heart seems to speed up, just from knowing she’s close by.

The difference is the fact that she hugs him one night before they go to bed and he ends up sleeping in a shirt he’d worn all day just because every once in a while he catches the scent of her on the fabric.

(Caduceus must notice, because Caduceus notices everything. But he doesn’t say anything.)

iv. 

Jester is tactile in a way that Fjord generally is not. In the aftermath of his recent realization, this becomes...complicated. He doesn’t magically become comfortable with taking her hand whenever he wants, or instinctively kissing her on the cheek whenever he feels like it. And he’s not the type to let himself ascribe meaning to every time she grabs him to lead him off somewhere, or the way she lingers in her hugs.

She does that with everyone. It doesn’t mean anything.

Right? 

(And then he sees her panicking, sees her _drowning,_ and he knows there’s only one option. So he takes her face into his hands and breathes all the air he has left into her lungs.

He’s glad they both make it out.

But if one of them had to go, he would’ve been glad to know it wasn’t going to be her.)

v.

“Fjord?”

He jumps, and tries too late to hide it, turning to face her and resting his arms, would-be casually, against the ship’s rail. “Jester?”

“Hi.” She’s dressed in a pale pink nightgown, barefoot, but her eyes are lively enough that he can tell she hasn’t slept yet. “Can I keep you company?”

“Yeah, ‘course. You alright?”

She shrugs, coming up next to him and staring out over the water. “Yeah, I think so.”

“You sure? It’s late.”

“I know. I was thinking.”

“Okay. You wanna talk about it?” he offers, because he’s used to rambling, endless sentences from Jester. Used to oversharing, used to resigning himself to twenty-minute stories to make a point that could have been made in a few sentences. The fact that none of that is happening is more than a little concerning.

“I do, kind of.” She turns to face him, the slightest of pouts curving her lips. “But you have to promise you won’t be weird about it, okay?”

Stuffing down the instinct to be offended, Fjord nods. 

“Okay. Because I keep wanting to talk to Beau about it but she stopped answering me and now she just laughs at me instead so it’s very frustrating.”

Bizarrely, the whole rambling sentence makes Fjord feel somewhat better, so he just says, “What’s up?”

“So I know that you were saving my life and stuff and that was like super great of you but remember that one time you kind of kissed me under water?”

The world freezes for one heartstopping moment. “Um.”

She bites her lip. “I didn’t know if it counted as an actual kiss or not so I kept trying to ask Beau and also sometimes Yasha and also sometimes Nott, but they didn’t help at _all_.”

Throat dry, Fjord attempts to swallow hard. “I, uh. Did--do you want it to count as an actual kiss?”

“Well, not if it wasn’t _supposed_ to,” she says, frowning and crossing her arms across her chest.

“I…” He breathes in, slowly. Exhales. “I don’t think it counts.”

“Oh. Okay.” Her voice is very small, and he hurries on.

“But not because I don’t want to kiss you.”

“Oh,” she says again, a grin starting to bloom across her face. She lets her arms fall to her sides, shifting her weight briefly onto her toes before standing upright again. “Really?”

“Really. I just--wouldn’t have wanted that to be our first time.”

She’s beaming now, inching closer to him like if she moves slowly enough he won’t notice the closing distance. Like he isn’t so completely attuned to everything she does. “What should we do instead then?”

Later, Fjord won’t know where he gets the courage to do what he does, which is to say, “How about this?” and pull her into his arms, then press his lips to hers.

She makes a happy little sound, twining her arms around his neck, and licks her way into his mouth. She tastes like peppermint and spun sugar and the kind of breathlessly unfettered joy he never lets himself feel.

It’s a long, long time before they separate again.

**Author's Note:**

> Heart-and-Music prompted me with "five senses" today. Then I listened to Travis's Fjord playlist on Spotify, and this happened. Thanks, H. <3
> 
> (I'm still on 2x32. GETTING THERE, Y'ALL.)


End file.
